Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Thursday, October 20, 2016

James Whale | Bride of Frankenstein

William
Hurlbut (screenplay, adapted from Hurlbut’s and John L. Balderston’s adaptation
of the novel by Mary Shelley), James Whale (director) Bride of Frankenstein / 1935

Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein confirms what we
all suspected after watching his Frankenstein,
that the monster survived the mill fire. But this time around, having truly
discovered his métier, Whale—at first
resisting the directorial assignment—clearly determined to just have fun,
creating a kind of homosexual hoot, which any gay man born before 1970 would
have immediately recognized as pure camp.

By framing this sequel within the context
of Lord Byron’s friendshipwith the
Shelleys (Byron, one should recall, was self-admittedly bisexual), wherein Mary
picks up the tale with the end of the first film, Whale also allows himself to
weave in, throughout Bride of
Frankenstein, a tale of—if not of homosexuality—at least of bisexuality.

Although this film finally sees the
recovered Henry Frankenstein (once again Colin Clive) married to his Elizabeth
(this time, Valerie Hobson), who helps in his redemption from his former evil
ways, he is “tempted”—or perhaps we should say blackmailed—to return to his
black arts by his former philosophy teacher, Doctor Pretorius (played with
relish by Ernest Thesiger). Pretorius, it is clear, is homosexual, urging his
student to “'Be fruitful and multiply’. Let us obey the Biblical injunction:
you of course have the choice of natural means; but as for me, I am afraid that
there is no course open me but the scientific way.”

The homunculi Pretorius has created have
been “spawned” and grown, not sewn together from dead corpses as Henry’s
monster has been, and they represent—the King, the Queen, and the Ballerina—figures
that might be in the imagination of just such a “sissified” being.* No
soldiers, boxers, or ordinary workers are contained in his cabinet of
curiosities. Gay film historian Vito Russo has described him as a “gay
Mephistopheles.”

Not only is the evil Pretorius able to
convince the newly married Henry to return to his dark past, but, being in love
with death itself, meets us and befriends the monster within a crypt, using the
monster himself as a tool to convince Henry to join him in creating a “mate”
for the Frankenstein monster.

We discover that the monster, with the
brain of a 10-year old, does not really know anything about sexuality,
particularly through the hermit scene, where the monster discovers his first
“friend,” in the form of a blind man (O. P. Heggie), who offers him the holy
sacraments of bread and wine—while
praying to God for the monster’s visitation—as well as introducing his new
guest to the delights of smoking, the latter of which the monster particularly
enjoys—once he is rid of his fears for the fire it requires to ignite it. But,
once again, society intrudes in the form of two passing hunters, who,
reasserting his dread of fire, burn down the hermit’s hut in their attempts to
rid the world of this “monster.”

Even when he finally gets a glimpse of his
bride—whose heart, the movie hints, may have been Henry’s new bride (although
Whale historians have denied that the director ever intended this, the movie
certainly suggests it when the monster carries her away, and Pretorius’
assistant Karl, soon after, brings him a “fresh” heart) she too is simply a
“friend.” In short, we know that the monster has no comprehension of sexuality,
which Elsa Lanchester’s memorable screams and hisses seem to confirm. She is as
repulsed by the monster just as he is confused about what his bride might mean
to him.

Whale, in this “hoot” of a film, does not
stop there, however. This time around his cardboard Tyrolean characters are
truly crazies, led by the miraculous cackling of the Frankenstein servant,
Minnie (Una O’Connor). His previously “aroused” peasants are now a kind of mob
out to get not only the innocent monster (who has, in this film alas, killed a
great number of people—a disturbing fact for the Hays Office), but its
creators, both the unwilling Henry and his devious mentor, Pretorius. Yet it
is, finally, the monster himself—who admittedly prefers death—who destroys
himself, his bride, and Pretorius by pulling the lever which will blow up the
laboratory in which they are assailed.

In so doing, the monster, in fact, allows
the continued existence of his God, reversing the myth of Wagner’s the Ring
cycle. In Whale’s fantastical version of the Shelley story, it is the sinful
humans who allow the Gods, whatever their destructive infatuations, to continue
to live. And in the mad Valhalla of Frankenstein-land the hierarchical worlds
(of both the Frankenstein’s and the idiot Burgomaster) survive. In Whale’s
films even the most absurd of hierarchical society is preserved, just as the
little monsters in all of us are forever destroyed. Did I say forever?